Last Friday was my last day at the White House. As I begin my fellowship at Harvard University,I’d like to share my reflections on public service. Over the last decade, I have had the privilegeof serving as the U.S. Chief Information Officer in President Obama’s Administration, as theChief Technology Officer in Mayor Fenty’s cabinet in Washington, DC, as the Assistant Secretaryof Commerce and Technology in Government Kaine’s cabinet in Virginia, and as the Director of Infrastructure in Arlington County. Serving the public and working alongside the dedicated andtalented men and women who serve the American people every day, has been the honor andexperience of a lifetime.In his Inaugural Address, President Obama said: “We have duties to ourselves, our nation andthe world; duties that we do not grudgingly accept, but rather seize gladly, firm in theknowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character thangiving our all to a difficult task.”To me, that is the essence of public service. And like many others, my commitment to publicservice is rooted in my own American story.I was born in New Delhi, India, and lived in Tanzania until I was eleven. I came to America in1985, when my parents decided to move to a land of unlimited opportunity built on thepremise that all men are created equal.I couldn’t speak English when I first arrived. I recall my first days at school in Gaithersburg,Maryland, and seeing a couple of African American kids around my age. They reminded me of my friends in Tanzania, so I walked up to them and starting speaking in Swahili. I was promptlymet by strange looks, so I started speaking even louder to make sure they understood me. Isuspect they thought I was making fun of them because the next thing I knew, I was beingbeaten up. Not the warm welcome I was expecting!But I was fortunate to have access to a good public education and to live in a country whereanything is possible if you work hard. And eventually, I learned English by watching “Three’sCompany” and taking English as a Second Language classes until the ninth grade. I went on to

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earn a great college education which opened up my world to opportunities that my parentscould only dream of.For me, public service has been a way to give back to a country that has given me so much.Since I first arrived here as a kid all those years ago, I’ve been inspired by that fundamentallyAmerican notion that no matter where you come from, no matter what you look like or howmuch money you have, you have a right to dream big and act boldly. It’s an idea that’s etchedinto our nation’s DNA.And today, as I reflect back on nearly a decade of public service, I’m once again reminded of what we can accomplish when we harness that American spirit, embrace bold ideas, and worktirelessly to execute them.I’d like to take you back to when the President was elected in November of 2008. He madetechnology a central part of his agenda, establishing the first-ever transition team focused ontechnology, innovation, and government reform. I had the honor of being a part of this team.Having served in city, county, and state governments, I’d seen firsthand the transformativepower of technology and the impact of a government that works effectively for its citizens.Unfortunately, when people think of the Federal Government, they think of red tape, long lines,and cold, distant bureaucracies. Too often the reins of government slip from the hands of “wethe people” to inaccessible and faceless government officials.And so, from a small, nondescript office in downtown Washington, we spent many long nightsfueled by coffee, thinking big about how we could transform our Government throughtechnology. I was ready to embark on a technology revolution in the Federal Government thatwould crack down on wasteful spending; increase the efficiency and effectiveness of government operations; enable an open, transparent, and participatory democracy; advancethe cybersecurity posture of the nation; and most importantly, improve delivery of citizenservices.You can only imagine how excited I was when the President appointed me as the nation’s firstChief Information Officer.

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On a bright February day, the previous morning’s dusting of snow melting on the ground, Iarrived at a White House that was, as the Washington Post put it, “stuck” in the “Dark Ages of technology.” In their words, “If the Obama campaign represented a sleek, new iPhone kind of future, the first day of the Obama administration looked more like the rotary-dial past.”As my team congratulated me on the new job, they handed me a stack of documents with $27billion worth of technology projects that were years behind schedule and millions of dollarsover budget. At the time, those documents were what passed for real-time updates on theperformance of IT projects. My neighbor’s ten year old could look up the latest stats of hisfavorite baseball player on his phone on the school bus, but I couldn’t get an update on how wewere spending billions of taxpayer dollars while at my desk in the White House. And at thesame time, the President of the United States had to fight tooth and nail to simply get ablackberry.These were symptoms of a much larger problem.The information technology gap between the public and private sectors makes the FederalGovernment less productive and less effective at providing basic services to its citizens. Closingthis gap is the key to making government work better for the American people – the ultimategoal.As I reflect on my time as the U.S. Chief Information Officer, I am proud of how much weaccomplished.The first order of business was to stop the bleeding by cracking down on wasteful spending. TheFederal Government is the largest purchaser of IT on the planet, with over $80 billion spent onover 12,000 systems every year. For too long, we had witnessed runaway projects that wastedbillions of dollars and fell years behind schedule. By the time some of these projects launched –if they launched at all – they were already obsolete. With a stack of documents as the bestsource of information on federal IT project performance, it’s no surprise we found out aboutthese failures only after they became newspaper headlines.But I knew that it didn’t have to be that way. Just a few years earlier in Virginia when I wasGovernor Tim Kaine’s Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Technology, I’d seen howtechnology-enabled transparency could drive performance.